246: New Nuclear Criticism |10:15 AM–11:30 AM Friday, Jan 4, 2019 | Hyatt Regency – Randolph 3

Presenters: Jada Ach, U of South Carolina, Columbia, Bradley J. Fest, Hartwick C, Jessica Hurley, U of Chicago, Kristin George Bagdanov, U of California, Davis, Kyoko Matsunaga, Kobe City U of Foreign Studies, Inna Sukhenko, U of Helsinki

Presider:  Frances Ferguson, U of Chicago

Contact: Kristin George Bagdanov, kgeorgebagdanov[at]ucdavis[dot]edu

Summary: The year 2019 marks the thirty-fifth anniversary of the 1984 colloquium at Cornell University on nuclear criticism and the publication of a special issue of Diacritics collecting the Cornell papers. Do we need a new nuclear criticism? Panelists explore what a new nuclear criticism in the context of ecological crisis might look like by drawing on archives, methods, and approaches not previously included in nuclear criticism’s original manifestation.

Full Description:

2019 will mark the thirty-fifth anniversary of the 1984 colloquium at Cornell University on nuclear criticism and the publication of a special issue of Diacritics collecting its papers. The conference occurred at a historical moment of heightened tension between the United States and the Soviet Union unseen since the chilling days of October 1962. But in the intervening years, which have seen the end of the Cold War, a reduction of the US and Russia’s nuclear arsenal, a nuclear treaty with Iran, and waning cultural depictions of global nuclear war, the project of nuclear criticism has seemed less vital and, indeed, at times rather anachronistic. And yet the nuclear’s many forms—waste, weapon, and energy—continue to proliferate and are now inextricable from the ecological crisis known as the Anthropocene. This roundtable seeks to explore the contours of a new nuclear criticism with special attention to ecological crisis by drawing on archives, methods, and approaches not previously included in nuclear criticism’s original manifestation.

This roundtable contends that “the nuclear” represents a critical intersection of geopolitics and ecology. Contemporary ecocritical frameworks can help develop a new nuclear criticism, one that is expanded and reconfigured to address the limits of this project’s previous manifestation. The “original” nuclear criticism, incited by President Reagan’s revival of Cold War rhetoric in the 1980s, primarily analyzed nuclear narratives implicit in political discourse and uncovered unconscious nuclear fears in canonical literary texts. At its outset, proponents of nuclear criticism imagined it would be a wild success, envisioning its institutionalization and establishment as a discrete academic department in colleges around the world. Why, then, did it all but fade into obscurity simply because the Cold War had been declared over? One possible explanation is that its exigency rested too heavily on the rhetorical coupling of the Cold War and nuclear weapons, as it based its theoretical interventions on the unthinkability of nuclear apocalypse (e.g. Frances Ferguson’s “nuclear sublime”) and on nuclear war as a totalizing event (e.g. Derrida’s “ultimate referent”). Furthermore, this version of nuclear criticism relied upon a fairly narrow archive (political discourse and novels or films), method (deconstruction), and formulation of the nuclear (“the bomb” or the spectacular event). Thus, a new nuclear criticism must rely on alterative avenues of support to defend its necessity and portability.

This panel joins the ongoing discussions regarding literature of the first and second nuclear ages made by a new generation of scholars such as Paul K. Saint-Amour, John Canady, Daniel Cordle, Daniel Grausam, Jessica Hurley, Bradley J. Fest, and others. It also responds to recent scholarship that has subsumed nuclear criticism under the broader concept of risk criticism inspired by Ulrich Beck (e.g., the work of Ursula K. Heise, Paul Crosthwaite, and Molly Wallace’s Risk Criticism). Building on the advances made by these scholars, and in some cases productively working against them, this roundtable radically expands the objects of study as well as the methods employed by nuclear criticism.

One cluster of scholars on this roundtable contends directly with the original codification of nuclear criticism in the Diacritics issue mentioned previously. Bradley J. Fest addresses Jacques Derrida’s “No Apocalypse, Not Now” to assess how his “nuclear referent” has found its way into twenty-first-century depictions of ecological disaster. Such representations, Fest argues, have now reinscribed themselves in the contemporary cultural imagination of nuclear war. Jessica Hurley responds to another critical term from the original Diacritics issue—Frances Ferguson’s “nuclear sublime”—by offering an alternative heuristic: the nuclear mundane. The nuclear mundane approaches the nuclear age with an eye for its material realities, focusing on the environmental, infrastructural, bodily, and social impacts of nuclear technologies and the politics that prioritize them, as well as the narrative forms that are used to promote and disrupt them. Kristin George Bagdanov interrogates Nuclear Criticism’s emphasis on the future perfect tense and the unrepresentability of total nuclear war by theorizing a parallel history of “atomic afrofuturism,” which complicates and reconfigures the temporal assumptions of Nuclear Criticism and when the apocalypse occurs.

A second cluster of scholars approaches the concepts and legacies of nuclear criticism and its Cold War instantiation more broadly by offering alternative archives, definitions, and affects that might be pertinent for a new nuclear criticism. Kyoko Matsunaga, for example, repositions the nuclear age through the lens of indigenous studies, examining how indigenous writers have challenged the mainstream discourse of nuclear apocalypse as well as the threat of nuclear contamination by incorporating narratives of tribal sovereignty, Native survival, and border-crossing. Jada Ach turns specifically to the American Southwest to imagine a new nuclear archive via nuclear monuments and energy museums in the heart of “uranium country.” She examines how artistic collaborations in the Navajo Nation function as sites of resistance that interrogate the toxic legacies of America’s radioactive nation-building project. And Inna Sukhenko considers the legacy of Chernobyl (which occurred two years after the Diacritics issue) and the intensification of nuclear energy by taking a psychoanalytic approach to the relationship between nuclear subject formation, nuclear phobia, and nuclear proliferation today.

Against all of these positions, we still ask: do we, in fact, need a new nuclear criticism? And how do intersections of race and class—the so-called “sacrifice zones” of nuclear fallout and testing—affect the way we do nuclear criticism? Why “the nuclear” and not other forms of toxic and pernicious materialities that characterize the Anthropocene?

Presenters:

Jada Ach is a doctoral student and Bilinski Dissertation Fellow at the University of South Carolina where she specializes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature and ecocriticism. Her dissertation, Sand, Water, Salt: Managing the Elements in Literature of the American West, 1880-1925, focuses on the often messy relations between humans and environments in literature set in the so-called wasteland spaces of the Western United States. Her work has appeared in Western American Literature and Ecozona: European Journal of Literature, Culture, and Environment. Jada is the recipient of a Charles Redd Center Award, the Rhude Patterson Trustee Fellowship, the Western Literature Association’s J. Golden Taylor Award, and a North Carolina Arts Council Regional Artist Project Grant. In addition to teaching courses in composition and American literature at USC, Jada also leads writing workshops at South Carolina’s Congaree National Park.

Bradley J. Fest is assistant professor of English at Hartwick College. He is currently working on Too Big to Read: The Megatext in the Twenty-First Century, a book project investigating massive contemporary texts across media. A scholar of twentieth- and twenty-first-century United States literature and digital media, his research investigates how cultural forms can help us understand global risk, particularly the connected issues of climate change, digital networks, international conflict, and democratic literacy. His work has been published or is forthcoming in Begging the Question (Marymount Institute Press, forthcoming 2018), boundary 2, The b2o Review, CounterText, Critical Quarterly, Critique, David Foster Wallace and “The Long Thing” (Bloomsbury, 2014), First Person Scholar, Scale in Literature and Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), The Silence of Fallout (Cambridge Scholars, 2013), Studies in the Novel, and Wide Screen. He is also the author of two volumes of poetry, The Rocking Chair (Blue Sketch, 2015) and The Shape of Things (Salò, 2017), and recent poems have appeared in amberflora, Empty Mirror, Grain, HVTN, Masque & Spectacle, Nerve Cowboy, The Offbeat, Spork, Verse, and elsewhere. More information is available at bradleyjfest.com.

Kristin George Bagdanov is a PhD candidate in literature at U.C. Davis. Her dissertation “Nuclear Forms” is about how American poetry responds to and reimagines nuclear power across the cold war period. As a graduate student liaison for the Association for Literature and the Environment, she is helping to plan the 2019 ASLE conference at UC Davis. She is also a poet, and received her MFA from Colorado State University. Her poems have appeared in Boston Review, Colorado Review, Puerto Del Sol and other journals. Her first full-length poetry collection, Fossils in the Making is forthcoming from Black Ocean in 2019. She is the poetry editor for Ruminate Magazine.

Jessica Hurley is a Harper-Schmidt Fellow in the Society of Fellows and Collegiate Assistant Professor in the Humanities at the University of Chicago. She is currently completing a book manuscript titled Infrastructures of Apocalypse: American Literature and the Nuclear Complex and working on a second, Nuclear Decolonizations. Her research focuses on the liberatory strategies that minoritized writers have developed to resist the American nuclear complex both within the United States and across the Global South. Her work has appeared in ASAP/Journal, American Literature, Extrapolation, Frame, The Faulkner Journal, and the edited collection The Silence of Fallout: Nuclear Criticism in a Post-Cold War World; in 2018 she co-edited Apocalypse, a special issue of ASAP/Journal focusing on the power of apocalyptic forms to shape our experience of contemporary social, political, and environmental crises.

Kyoko Matsunaga is an associate professor at Kobe City University of Foreign Studies, Japan, and a former Fulbright fellow at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She specializes in Indigenous American literature, nuclear/atomic literature, and environmental literature. Her essays have appeared in such books and journals as Ecocriticism in Japan (Lexington Books, 2017), Critical Insights: American Multicultural Identity (Salem Press, 2014), Sovereignty, Separatism, and Survivance: Ideological Encounters in the Literature of Native North America (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), and Southwestern American Literature. She is also the co-editor of two books published in Japan: Listening to Alternative Voices: Ethnicity and Gender in Contemporary English Literature (Otowa Shobou Tsurumi Shoten, 2011) and Crossing the Waves of Ecocriticism: Living during the Anthropocene (Otowa-shobō Tsurumi-shoten, 2017). Her book, Defying Apocalypse: American Indigenous Writers and Nuclear Narratives, will be published in Japan in May, 2019. She currently serves as the Vice President of the Society for Ecocriticism Studies in Japan.

Inna Sukhenko is a postdoctoral researcher of Helsinki University Humanities Program, the University of Helsinki (Finland), working in the field of environmental humanities, ecocriticism, nuclear narrative studies. Her special interest lies with “Chornobyl narrative” within ecocritical studies and the energy humanities. She is a member of Association for Literary Urban Studies (Finland), HELSUS (Helsinki Institute of Sustainability Sciences, Finland), the Finnish Society for Development Research (Finland), Ecological Information Center (Ukraine), Cross Media Lab (Ukraine).

Further Reading:

Amundson, Michael. Yellowcake Towns: Uranium Mining Communities in the American West. University Press of Colorado, 2004.

Belletto, Steve, and Daniel Grausam, editors. American Literature and Culture in an Age of Cold War: A Critical Reassessment. University Of Iowa Press, 2012.

Blouin, Michael, et al., editors. The Silence of Fallout: Nuclear Criticism in Post-Cold War World. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013.

Boyer, Paul S. By the Bomb’s Early Light : American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age. Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, 1994.

Brians, Paul. Nuclear Holocausts: Atomic War in Fiction, 1895-1984. The Kent State UP, 1987.

Brown, Kate. Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters. Oxford University Press, 2013.

Canaday, John. The Nuclear Muse: Literature, Physics, and the First Atomic Bombs. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000.

Cordle, Daniel. Late Cold War Literature and Culture: The Nuclear 1980s. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.

Gery, John. Nuclear Annihilation and Contemporary American Poetry: Ways of Nothingness. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996.

Grausam, Daniel. On Endings:  American Postmodern Fiction and the Cold War. Virginia UP, 2011.

Fest, Bradley J.“The Inverted Nuke in the Garden: Archival Emergence and Anti-Eschatology in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.” boundary 2 39, no. 3 (Fall 2012): 125–49.

Fest, Bradley J. “Geologies of Finitude: The Deep Time of Twenty-First-Century Catastrophe in Don DeLillo’s Point Omega and Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 57, no. 5 (2016): 565–78.

Gusterson, Hugh. “Nuclear Tourism.” Journal for Cultural Research 8, no. 1 (January 2004): 23–31.

Hecht, Gabrielle. Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade. MIT Press, 2012.

Hecht, Gabrielle. “The Power of Nuclear Things.” Technology and Culture, 51 (2010): 1-30.

Hurley, Jessica. “Impossible Futures: Fictions of Risk in the Longue Durée.” American Literature 89:4 (December 2017).

Kinsella, John and Drew Milne, eds. “nuclear theory degree zero: essays against the nuclear android.” Special issue of Angelaki 22:3 (2017).

Klein Richard, editor. “Nuclear Criticism.” Diacritics, 14.2 (Summer 1984).

Klein, Richard. “The Future of Nuclear Criticism.” Yale French Studies, no. 77 (1990): 76–100

Kuletz, Valerie. The Tainted Desert: Environmental and Social Ruin in the American West. Routledge, 1998.

Lippit, Akira Mizuta. Atomic Light (Shadow Optics). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005.

Luckhurst, Roger. “Nuclear Criticism: Anachronism and Anachorism.” Diacritics 23, no. 2 (Summer, 1993): 89–97.

Masco, Joseph. The Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post-Cold War New Mexico. Princeton University Press, 2006.

Matsunaga, Kyoko. “Bridging Borders: Leslie Marmon Silko’s Cross-Cultural Vision in the Atomic Age.” Critical Insights: American Multicultural Identity, edited by Linda Moser and Kathryn West, Salem P, 2014, pp.170-84.

Matsunaga, Kyoko. “From Apocalypse to Nuclear Survivance: The Transpacific Nuclear Narrative in Gerald Vizenor’s Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57.” Sovereignty, Separatism, and Survivance: Ideological Encounters in the Literature of Native North America, edited by Ben Carson. Cambridge Scholars P, 2009, pp.111-28.

Matsunaga, Kyoko. “Leslie Marmon Silko and Nuclear Dissent in the American Southwest.” The Japanese Journal of American Studies, no.25, 2014, pp.68-87.

Matsunaga, Kyoko.“Resisting and Surviving Apocalypse: Simon J. Ortiz’ (Post)Colonial Nuclear Narrative.” Southwestern American Literature, Fall 2008, pp.15-27.

McGurl, Mark. “Ordinary Doom: Literary Studies in the Waste Land of the Present.” New Literary History 41, no. 2 (Spring 2010): 329–39.

Nadel, Alan. Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age. Duke University Press Books, 1995.

Ruthven, K. K. Nuclear Criticism. Melbourne University Press, 1989.

Saint-Amour, Paul K. Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.

Scarry, Elaine. Thermonuclear Monarchy: Choosing between Democracy and Doom. New York: W. W. Norton, 2014.

Scheick, William J. “Nuclear Criticism: An Introduction” Papers in Language and Literature 26, no. 1 (1990): 3–12.

Schell, Jonathan. The Fate of the Earth. Knopf, 1982.

Schwenger, Professor Peter. Letter Bomb: Nuclear Holocaust and the Exploding Word. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.

Seed, David. Under the Shadow: The Atomic Bomb and Cold War Narratives. Kent State University Press, 2013.

Sharp, Patrick B. Savage Perils: Racial Frontiers and Nuclear Apocalypse in American Culture. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007.

Solomon, J. Fisher. “Probably Circumstances, Potential Worlds: History, Futurity, and the ‘Nuclear Referent.’” Papers in Language and Literature 26, no. 1 (1990): 60–72.

Sprod, Liam. Nuclear Futurism: The Work of Art in the Age of Remainderless Destruction. Winchester, UK: Zero, 2012.

Weart, Spencer R. The Rise of Nuclear Fear. 1988. Harvard UP, 2012.

Williams, Paul. Race, Ethnicity and Nuclear War: Representations of Nuclear Weapons and Post-Apocalyptic Worlds. Liverpool University Press, 2012.

Van Wyck, Peter. Signs of Danger: Waste, Trauma, and Nuclear Threat. University of Minnesota Press, 2005.

Voyles, Traci Brynne. Wastelanding: Legacies of Uranium Mining in Navajo Country. University of Minnesota Press, 2015.

Wallace, Molly. Risk Criticism. University of Michigan Press, 2016,

Zins, Daniel L. “Exploding the Canon: Nuclear Criticism in the English Department.” Papers in Language and Literature 26, no. 1 (1990): 13–40.